Editing
Tabs and split view
Section titled “Tabs and split view”Every document opens in a tab. A middle click on a tab closes it, and files can be dropped on the window from the file manager.
The window splits into two views, side by side or stacked (View → Rotate Split View):
- drag a tab onto the right or bottom third of the text and the document moves to the other view;
- with Ctrl (or for the only tab) the document is cloned: the same text in two views with their own scrolling and carets;
- Move to Other View and Clone to Other View do the same from the tab’s menu;
- F8 moves the focus between the views, and Synchronize Vertical Scrolling and Synchronize Horizontal Scrolling move them together.
Multiple carets and columns
Section titled “Multiple carets and columns”- Alt + drag, or Alt+Shift+arrows, selects a rectangle — even past the end of short lines.
- Typing, deleting, copying and pasting work on every line of the rectangle at once.
- Multi-select Next and Multi-select All add carets on the same word; the last one added can be undone or skipped. Esc goes back to one caret.
- Edit → Column Editor… (Alt+C) inserts text or numbers on each line — decimal, hexadecimal, octal or binary, padded with zeros or spaces.
Widths are counted in cells, as in a terminal: Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters take two columns, so rectangles stay straight.
Line operations
Section titled “Line operations”Everything in the Edit menu is one undo step and has Notepad++’s keys:
- duplicate (Ctrl+D), delete, move up and down (Ctrl+Shift+↑/↓), join (Ctrl+J) and split lines;
- sort lexicographically, ignoring case, as integers, as decimals with a comma or a dot, by length — ascending and descending; sort by the columns of a rectangular selection; reverse and randomize;
- remove duplicate, consecutive duplicate and empty lines, trim spaces, convert tabs and spaces;
- case: UPPERCASE, lowercase, Proper Case, Sentence case, iNVERT cASE, rAnDoM cAsE;
- line and block comments with the document’s language tokens (Ctrl+Q).
Indentation, braces and highlighting
Section titled “Indentation, braces and highlighting”- Auto-indent (
editor.auto-indent): off, basic (as the line above) or advanced — one level more after an opening bracket. - Ctrl+B goes to the matching brace.
- Smart highlighting marks every occurrence of the selected word in the visible text.
- Search → Style All Occurrences of Token colors a word with one of five styles (Ctrl+Alt+1…5); you can jump between them and copy the styled text.
- Closing brackets and quotes and call tips — see auto-completion.
Folding and bookmarks
Section titled “Folding and bookmarks”Blocks fold by the syntax tree (by indentation in plain text): with the boxes in the margin, Fold All, Unfold All, and by levels 1–8.
A click in the symbol margin sets a bookmark (Ctrl+F2); F2 and Shift+F2 go between them. Bookmarked lines can be cut, copied, removed or inverted in one command.
Change history
Section titled “Change history”A margin between the bookmarks and the folding marks the lines changed since the file was opened: orange until they are saved, green after. editor.change-history = "off" turns it off.
Display
Section titled “Display”View → Show Symbol shows spaces and tabs, line endings (CR, LF, CRLF), indentation guides and the wrap symbol. You can also turn on a vertical edge at several columns (editor.edge), the current line as a background or a frame, word wrap and zoom (Ctrl++, Ctrl+-, Ctrl+0).
View → Monitoring (tail -f) follows a file that grows, like tail -f: handy for logs.
Right-to-left text
Section titled “Right-to-left text”Rows with Hebrew or Arabic show in their proper order by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, with carets and clicks where they belong. Edit → Text Direction RTL turns a whole view right to left.